Teaching global perspectives: engineering ethics across international and academic borders

Abstract

Recent policy reports on responsible innovation emphasize the need to make ethics integral to advanced engineering programs. Students, however, usually perceive ethics as a set of rules and principles embedded in codes rather than as a set of open-ended approaches and a potential source of innovative research questions. We report on the pilot offering of an intensive summer program for graduate students, Global Perspectives: Engineering Ethics Across International and Academic Borders, which aimed to shift this perspective by creating opportunities for students to explore the challenging situation of ethics within graduate engineering education and specifically to engage in collaborative, interdisciplinary ethics research. By synthesizing scholarship from the philosophy of emotion, student voice, and early engagement, we aimed to create a space for student exploration, collaborative learning, and active knowledge production. The student commentaries that follow the article serve as the program's preliminary assessment and draw attention to the important role that students may play in shaping new pedagogical initiatives.

Keywords:

• engineering ethics
• interdisciplinary collaboration
• emotion
• pedagogy
• student engagement
• graduate education

Acknowledgements

The observations in this paper do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. Thank you to Alison Cook-Sather for helpful suggestions regarding student voice theory. Thank you to David Guston and to two anonymous reviewers for helpful guidance and feedback on earlier drafts.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant #1237830. Work on this contribution was supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) as part of the research program “New Technologies as Social Experiments” under project number 277-20-003.

Notes on contributors

Mary E. Sunderland is a historian of science and technology at UC Berkeley where she is affiliated with the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society and the Department of Nuclear Engineering. She is especially interested in science and engineering education, the life sciences, and translational research.

Behnam Taebi is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Technology at the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management, Delft University of Technology. His research interests lie in energy ethics and responsible innovation. He is currently co-editing a volume on “Ethics of Nuclear Energy” (under contract with Cambridge University Press) and a special issue of Journal of Risk Research on “Socio-technical challenges of nuclear power”.

Cathryn Carson is a historian of contemporary science and technology. At UC Berkeley she is affiliated with the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society. Since 2010 she has served as Associate Dean of Social Sciences.

William Kastenberg is currently the Daniel M. Tellep Distinguished Professor of Engineering, Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. His interests include risk analysis methods for complex technological and natural systems, and engineering ethics. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the AAAS and the ANS.

Notes

1. The Minner Fellows Program is aimed at selected College of Engineering faculty members each summer who attend an intensive short course focused on engineering ethics pedagogy. Minner Faculty Fellows then integrate ethics and social responsibility considerations into their courses.

2. Recognizing that engineering ethics education needs reforming, Delft is piloting new initiatives to involve students from engineering faculties as ethics co-teachers. While there are some small-scale experiences that report on the benefits of joint teaching (Zandvoort, Hasselt, and Bonnet 2008), the university has expressed the ambition to scale up this model by supporting a program that would enable engineering students to become co-teachers. The involvement of graduate students from engineering faculties would bring more relevant substance from each specific field to reform the content of teaching. In her commentary, Robaey emphasizes that the success of this kind of co-teaching program will require institutions to modify the incentive structures that motivate students.